Live review: Ben Folds Five brilliantly gets loose

Maybe he sneaks onto Space Mountain for repeat rides before gigs at House of Blues, happily scrambling his circuitry until he’s game for anything once he hits the stage. Far-fetched, yeah, you’re right. Could be he just really likes playing Anaheim, or to O.C. crowds. Still, seems like there must be a more unexplainable reason why he keeps delivering such freewheeling performances at the Mouse House.

A year and a half ago at this cramped spot, on his own tour, he served up more than 30 songs in nearly three hours that found him freestyling over "Free Bird," performing his most famous song ("Brick") as a piano solo, singing "Hiroshima" in Japanese (naturally), covering everyone from Muddy Waters to Ke$ha and, as he often does, leading his excitable audiences in four-part glee-club harmonies.

This time, reconnecting unique chemistry with old friends Robert Sledge (bass) and Darren Jessee (drums) as Ben Folds Five for the much-missed trio’s first tour since the turn of the millennium, he (and they) immediately loosened up just as much. Thrillingly for fans – particularly die-hards who followed the group from location to location since the Wiltern last Saturday, or even Vegas before that – the group completely veered off its usual course for this last reunion gig before leaving.

I spied the planned set list near the soundboard shortly before newcomer Nataly Dawn delivered an attractive opening set reminiscent of Madeleine Peyroux and Regina Spektor, albeit with a little more rasp-rock than either. (She also does a fine rendition of Coldplay’s "Green Eyes.")

Give or take two or four tunes, what Folds & Co. had on the night’s menu was pretty much what they played for packed crowds in L.A. and at HOB San Diego: most of their very fine September album The Sound of the Life of the Mind, as you’d anticipate, sprinkled amid a dozen BF5 favorites.

Some of them are musts: "Jackson Cannery," the first song from their first album, is almost always within the first three selections; their era-spoofing "Underground" is always near or at the end.

Other choices are infrequent and less obvious: only occasionally do they still give "Narcolepsy" or much else from difficult, underrated third album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, while "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces," the unhinged, dig-me-now revenge that opens their best work, Whatever and Ever Amen, seems to be held in reserve for special occasions.

None of that ultimately held true Tuesday night. Things changed right off the bat when first a tech appeared to replace one set list with another atop Folds’ piano, then the show began not with the winsome Wilsonesque harmonies of the new disc’s "Michael Praytor, Five Years Later," but with the poignant beauty (and even richer harmonics) of "Missing the War," which had been slated for eight songs later.

OK, so he made a last-minute substitution, no big whoop. Indeed, once Folds conferred with Jessee, who didn’t seem entirely sure what came next, the order continued as expected: "Praytor" and "Jackson Cannery," and sandwiched between two more new ones, "Hold That Thought" and "Erase Me" (the latter treated to a staggeringly pounded finish), there was a marvelously jazzed-up "Selfless, Cold & Composed."

That one, by the way, is a staple of Folds’ solo shows that, by comparison to the real thing here, underscored just how distinctive Ben Folds Five remains, how timeless their music has already become, and how equally skilled Sledge and Jessee are on their instruments, smartly supportive of Folds’ piano dazzle.

But after that impressively rejuvenated display came another shift: Enter a stunning "Alice Childress," one of the trio’s most Billy Joel-like numbers. And soon enough the set list got tossed aside completely.

Folds suddenly launched into "Best Imitation of Myself," a deceptively chipper tune that has rarely if at all been played stateside since this regrouping began. Out came some rarities: Several people had been shouting for "Emaline," so they obliged. Then they dusted off "Tom & Mary" (an equally obscure winner cut from their self-titled debut) and two more wonderful gems, "Julianne" (that girl who looks like Axl Rose) and "Fair," before diving into "Magic" and "Mess," back-to-back Reinhold Messner pieces.

Folds pointed out that the "planned order or arrangement of songs that you’re going to play for people you don’t know" – aka, a set list – well, "I dispensed with that long ago." The crowd started shouting even more requests, louder and louder, emboldened by his admission. "If you were in my position," he told those hollering, "and closed your eyes and heard that, you’d think a lot of people were really mad at you."

The spontaneity never let up, the group seeming to lob potential titles back and forth between songs. At one point they even indulged a group huddle around Jessee’s kit before deciding that, yes, this is the time to retell the rollicking tale of "Steven’s Last Night in Town" for the first time in 14 years – magnificently so, acknowledged by the crowd’s roar when it ended.

Several songs earlier, Folds spotted a fan down front in a T-shirt that apparently said "Get back Loretta." Somehow he took that to mean this devotee wanted to hear the band’s classic kiss-off "Song for the Dumped," capped by its demand to "give me money back, you bitch." Sledge logically assumed the shirt was referencing the Beatles’ tune and kicked off its galloping bass line.

They went into "Dumped" anyway, but midway through it Folds tried to insert a few lines of "Get Back," quickly making funny for not remembering the words. But the crowd, among the most enthusiastic I’ve come across, wasn’t about to let the idea go: When a break in the music came, setting up the brief final verse, they burst into the Beatles chorus before it could start. Smiling Folds, never one to shy from an opportunity to mix it up, leapt from his stool and went with it, dividing the room into halves to sing along loudly on overlapping melodies.

It was a terrifically genuine moment like rarely get anymore at concerts of any size, and there was still more to come: a hearty shout-out for "Kate," left-field renditions of country staples "Your Cheatin’ Heart" and "Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home." "Narcolepsy" woke up, too, and "Philosophy" and "Underground" capped it off. The only older cuts they’ve played just about everywhere else that weren’t revived here were "Army" and "Battle of Who Could Care Less." But who would complain that something was missing?

My only complaint would come if they decided to stop playing again. They so clearly love it, and sound so remarkably sparked-up again, that it’d be a shame to set aside for too long.

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